Damage Quarantine and Recovery in Data Processing Systems

In this article, we address transparent Damage Quarantine and Recovery (DQR), a very important problem faced today by a large number of mission/life/business-critical applications and information systems that must manage risk, business continuity, and assurance in the presence of severe cyber attacks. Today, these critical applications still have a “good” chance to suffer from a big “hit ” from attacks. Due to data sharing, interdependencies, and interoperability, the hit could greatly “amplify ” its damage by causing catastrophic cascading effects, which may “force ” an application to halt for hours or even days before the application is recovered. In this paper, we first do a thorough discussion on the limitations of traditional fault tolerance and failure recovery techniques in solving the DQR problem. Then we present a systematic review on how the DQR problem is being solved. Finally, we point out some remaining research issues in fully solving the DQR problem